If legislators really wanted to reduce illegal immigration they would also go after the demand, implementing tougher penalties against those who hire illegal immigrants^^ or outsource to companies that do. Of course, this will never happen as the walmarts, mcdonalds, big tech corps^, etc will never allow it because surely their costs would go up and so would their prices.<p>Edit: ^ work at a big tech company? A decent percentage of the janitors and cooks are illegal (and, for the record, are not just Hispanic)<p>Edit2: ^^Including themselves--because they do.<p>edit3: (sorry I was on my smartphone before). If the supply of jobs for illegal immigrants goes down, so does their influx. It's true in the US--and it's true in Europe and it's true in Asia:
<a href="http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/1247156221.99/" rel="nofollow">http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/1247156221.99/</a>
<a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/01/93137/recession-enforcement-driving.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/01/93137/recession-enforc...</a><p>But then, of course, in a global economy, cutting the influx of illegal immigrants (and immigration in general) would lead to more jobs shipped north/south/overseas.<p>So in the end, many of these legislators are really just pandering and contributing to the fear-mongering here and everywhere as people are, in many cases, naturally xenophobic.
This strikes me as ridiculous fear mongering. The point of the law is "attrition through enforcement" - the idea being that illegal immigrants will leave Arizona if they see that the state is serious about enforcing immigration law. Are we to suppose that people will continue to live in Arizona illegally, given the knowledge that there are now real penalties? The article also uses scare language like "The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before" to make it sound like there's some grand plan to hunt down and lock up every illegal immigrant, so that the prison companies can charge the state for their upkeep. And yet the bill only provides for a maximum of 20 days in jail for a first offender, and 30 days in jail for subsequent offenses.
I guess one question is whether the bulk of the illegal immigrants in Arizona at any one time are using it as a residence or just passing through. This would definitely make it less attractive as a residence, but its advantages for transit are considerable.<p>The prison business has had some curious effects elsewhere a judge went to jail up around Scranton for abusing his power to send kids to jail for offenses that ordinarily might've rated probation before judgment; he was compensated by the company that ran juvenile prisons up there.
Unchecked undocumented immigration is a problem. There are a lot of people that want to come here for the right reasons and some that want to come here for the wrong reasons. The goal of any immigration reform should be to parse those two groups. Make it easier to be here legitimately to avoid the ongoing exploitation of the people that are here to work. Then focus enforcement on those that are not here legitimately because they are now not hiding among the crowds of people that just want to feed their families. This is what most people in AZ want, but the only lever they have is enforcement, it's not like Arizona can decide to unilaterally grant amnesty.<p>The idea of "papers please" is reprehensible, but where is the anger at the federal border patrol checkpoints between AZ and CA? An AZ cop asking for a drivers license during a traffic stop is supposedly "draconian fascist evil", but stopping people for no reason driving between two states is considered ok?<p>Imagine that after 9/11 the rest of the country said "good luck dealing with that terrorism problem NY. We're going to put checkpoints up to make sure those problems stay in your state and not ours."
Interestingly I recently attended a talk by Loic Wacquant[1] about prisons in the US, the US as penal state. This somehow fits.<p>[1] <a href="http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/wacquant/" rel="nofollow">http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/wacquant/</a>